I'm glad to see that Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) has launched a site with a petition calling on Harry Reid to lower the cloture number required to stop a filibuster from 60 to 55. Moderates ought to approve: It's a moderate move.

I don't think Harry Reid can pull this off by himself, but it's good to know that there's some buzz on the progressive side in the Senate to change the Senate rules so that majorities can legislate. That would seem a small accomplishment. It's going to be a major one. It will take years of work.

Let's get to work.

White House, this means you.

P. S. The estimable Ed Kilgore clinches the point about how much is at stake:

Since the Senate already has a built-in red-state bias, a supermajority requirement would basically represent a death sentence for progressive initiatives in the near future.

So Joe Lieberman thinks he's a mighty force? Here's what Harry Reid could tell him and his stalwart allies:

Show us the mettle, Joe & Co. If you want to filibuster, make it a real filibuster. None of this namby-pamby virtual stuff, but the real made-in-America kind--the stay-up-all-night, read-from-the-telephone-book, keep-the-chamber-pot-nearby kind, as described memorably by Eleanor Clift in Newsweek a few years back:

They used to call it "taking to the diaper," a phrase that referred to the preparation undertaken by a prudent senator before an extended filibuster. The late South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond holds the record for a solo filibuster from the time when he rambled for 24 hours and 18 minutes to prevent the Civil Rights Act of 1957 from coming to a vote. Thurmond geared up by visiting the steam room to get dehydrated so he could drink without needing a bathroom. An aide stood by in the cloakroom with a pail just in case.

Surely if it's so important to keep the country from lurching into a public option, it's worth putting your body where your sanctimony is. The memory of Strom Thurmond deserves no less.

Update 1, Oct. 28: Don't miss Michael Tomasky in the Guardian on Lieberman's "moral vanity."

Update 2, Oct. 28: When Ryan Grim of HuffPost explicitly asked Lieberman yesterday whether, to block the bill, he'd be prepared to "read from the phone book," in full-voiced filibuster style, he said: "I'd be prepared to."

Ben Smith of Politico reports that New York's Senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, have withdrawn their names from the host committee for J Street's upcoming first-ever conference. Schumer departed first, before the Congressional sponsor list was published; Gillibrand was listed, then followed Schumer out the door.*

This disgraceful bow-out is undoubtedly a cave-in to pressure from the usual suspects--organizational Jews who cohabited comfortably with Bush's 8-year stonewall in the Middle East; who have the gall to claim that being "pro-Israel" means slavishly following the Right; who do not represent (who precisely counter-represent) the 78 percent of American Jews who voted for Obama.

For the first time in living memory, a respectable pro-peace, pro-two-state Jewish organization is pulling itself together; and New York's liberal lights have gone dark.

The Jewish organizational establishment these days bemoans the fact that young Jews are drifting away. By advertising their belligerent pettiness, these groups are only guaranteeing that the young will stay largely turned off. The days of enforced uniformity are over. Schumer and Gillibrand have their eyes fixed firmly on the rear-view mirror.

* Update: Smith has revised his piece to say that Gillibrand "was 'unaware' she had been included on the group's list of supporters," according to her spokesman, Matt Canter.

Michael Moss has this shattering piece on E. coli hamburger poisoning in today's NYT. I gave up counting the number of companies he cites who seized upon every legal loophole to circumvent regulations that would keep feces out of ground beef.

And who was it, conservatives, you expected to keep you safe? Do you really want the government's hands out of your hamburger? Or is the paralyzed 22-year-old Stephanie Smith, a victim of E. coli passed down the food chain by Cargill in the guise of ""American Chef's Selection Angus Beef Patties," which included slaughterhouse trimmings, a case of collateral damage in the War Against Regulation?

It's worthwhile remembering, by the way, what a serious newspaper can do.

Our worthiest newspapers are once again declaring the virtue of bending over so far backwards to prove they don't tilt leftward that they topple over and turn into laughingstocks.

Over at the Washington Post, according to ombudsman Andrew Alexander, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli says:

we are not well-enough informed about conservative issues. It's particularly a problem in a town so dominated by Democrats and the Democratic point of view....I challenge our reporters and editors with great frequency to look at what is going on across the political spectrum . . . at the extremes, among the rabble-rousers, as well as among policymakers.

The Executive Editor does not express himself clearly. Take a close look at the evasive phrases "conservative issues" and "what is going on." Does Marcus Brauchli believe that WP reporters and editors should closely scrutinize the right-wing campaigns that diffuse untruths (Swift boats, death panels, missing birth certificates) and absurdly distorted uproars (Acorn as hooker counseling service, Cass Sunstein as Antichrist, etc.)? That it's time to investigate the organization and funding of such attacks, the ways in which they command the attention of Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh, Savage, O'Reilly & Co. and then seep from the rightosphere into the mainstream? Apparently not.

Rather, it would seem (though again, Brauchli's ambiguous wording, if accurately quoted, might be at fault) that Executive Editor Brauchli means that his editors and reporters should take these attacks seriously, let the birther-deather crowd set their agenda, let their obsessions be the Post's obsessions.

Alexander goes on to brandish the canard of canards that has thrilled wingers for some 30 years now:

The most authoritative recent research into the political leanings of newsrooms (including television, radio, magazines and wire services) shows they are considerably more liberal than the general public. At daily newspapers, those who "lean to the left still far outnumber those who lean to the right," said Indiana University journalism professor David H. Weaver, whose researchers surveyed 1,149 journalists in 2002 and recently conducted a follow-up study of 400.

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I've been wondering whether there's any rationality at all to Republican strategy now. Sometimes the leadership, if that's the right word, embrace the spasms of their farthest-gone crazies, as when Chuck Grassley endorses Glenn Beck, the militias tote guns to town meetings without incurring criticism from the party leadership, and John Boehner votes against censuring Stars-and-Bars Joe Wilson of South Carolina. Then again, sometimes the leadership lurches, afraid to embrace the crazies wholeheartedly but equally afraid to cast them away.

In either case, whether the Republicans tie themselves to their crazies everyday or only on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, the Republicans It would seem that insofar as they wear Joe Wilson's albatross around their collective neck, the Republicans have decided to become a frantic, revanchist, regional party of the Confederacy, prairie DaWN (Dakotas-Wyoming-Nebraska), and Alaska. In which case, full steam ahead or only half steam, they're doomed. Right?

But there's one circumstance in which this Republican doomsday strategy has a chance of working--improving their standing in national politics and enabling them to recover from 2006 and 2008. And this is if the economy founders badly enough and Obama is seen as a loser. In which case, the party's consolidated base recovers the ground lost in 2006 and 2008.

Read this fine piece of 2008 campaign analysis by Andrew Gelman and John Sides; and also the various comments, and Gelman's and Sides' responses. Gelman and Sides on 2008:

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Keynes wrote: "Even the most practical man of affairs is usually in the thrall of the ideas of some long-dead economist." An amendment: the crackpots on today's streets are in the thrall of the ideas of dead loons.

Alexander Zaitchik has an edifying piece up on Salon about Glenn Beck's intellectual debt, if we can call it that, to W. Cleon Skousen, a berserker from way back, Salt Lake City police chief ("He operated the police department like a Gestapo," said the conservative mayor) who specialized in grandiose, fantastical, conspiracy-thick tracts like The Naked Communist. This is the master thinker who has today's Republican Party in thrall.

Puts me in mind of the last lines of Camus's The Plague:

"Rieux...knew...that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for many years in the furniture and the linens; that it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the misery and the enlightenment of men, the plague would again arouse its rats and send them forth to die in a happy city."

Or was it the Founding Fathers? I forget.

Get Mary Landrieu's language on ABC's This Week yesterday: "those of us that are against public option [sic] are against it because we think it will undermine the private sector."

And the reason why that's a bad idea is--?

Health care certainly needs doctors, nurses, and people who perform all manner of work in hospitals and clinics. It benefits from prevention, nutrition, technology. And what's the reason why it needs private health insurance companies? I've yet to hear any.

What Landrieu obfuscates, of course, is that the only reason health insurance companies are players in the current debate is that they pay to play. They make piles of money and therefore have political clout.

And remarkably, even if most insured people say they like the particular policy they have, the public as a whole is consistently in favor of single-payer, and likes the public option despite the prospect--or because of the prospect--that it might grow into a national health system.

Wouldn't it be a hallelujah day if an interviewer asked a politician why we need private health insurance companies in the first place?

Michael Tomasky nails it: Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty's latest excursus into the Republican Dixie suck-up, as he "urged fellow governors on Thursday to more frequently assert state sovereignty over the federal government and suggested that the country may increasingly see states suing the federal government," has a fabulous lineage--the nullification movement of 1832, led (surprise!) by South Carolina, which set forth the doctrine that the states had the right to nullify Federal law. In the run-up to South Carolina's declaration that it was not bound by Federal tariffs, the state had in 1822 passed a Negro Seamen Act, requiring that sheriffs arrest all free black seamen while their ships were docked, lest they join slave rebellions.

This is the proud tradition that today's moderate, nonfanatical northern Republicans embrace.

It is the same tradition that the Roberts Court has been promoting in the sort-of United States of America--which is why the Wednesday night heckler Joe Wilson of South Carolina has to be taken seriously.

Who said Wilson's former boss Strom Thurmond was dead?

Update: The Wilson story keeps on giving. Courtesy Jack Bass of the College of Charleston:

Several years ago, [now-Rep. Wilson] loudly denounced the claim of Essie Mae Washington-Williams as being a daughter of Strom Thurmond. Mr. Wilson called her story "unseemly" and a "smear." Her name today is listed on the State House monument to her father, alongside those of his white children.

A major reason why a sensible health system has been throttled for decades: insurance companies, which thrive best when they deny care; insurance companies, which unlike hospitals, doctors, nurses, and other health workers, contribute nothing of value to national health; insurance companies, which line the pockets of the people's legislators.

Here are some numbers to bear in mind, and inscribe on signs, and pass out on flyers, and send to your friends, doctors, uncertains, Blue Dogs, Black Cats, whatever, during this fall's home stretch:

Total expenditure by private insurance companies, 2007: $680 billion*
Total expenditure on administrative costs + profits, 2007: $95 billion

Percentage of total expenditure spent on administrative costs + profits = 14%.

In other words, one in seven dollars Americans pay insurance companies stays with them.

By contrast, here are 2007 figures for Social Security and Medicare administrative costs:

Social Security = 0.9%

Medicare = 3%*

The people who run these companies may not be "bad people," but their institutional interest is not the public's interest. Not. The. Public's. Interest.

* The $680 billion does not include our co-pays and other out-of-pocket expenses.

** The Right disputes the Medicare figure. But nobody, nobody, claims that Medicare's true administrative costs are anything like 14%.

Update 12:51 pm. I apologize for earlier figures--my haste and sloppiness were to blame. Thanks to Harold Pollack of the University of Chicago for helping to set me straight.

Others more knowledgeable than I about the mechanics of health care reform, like TNR's Jonathan Cohn, have already begun commenting on the details that Obama elevated in his Wednesday night speech. I want to say only a small thing about a very large thing: his spirit.

He sounded like a winner. Like all great preachers, he started methodically and built to crescendos. The Republican responder, Charles Boustany of Louisiana, sounded like a whiner, crying, Deficit, deficit, and government-run, government-run, and built toward nothing. Obama charged the Republicans with specific lies. He made the obligatory gestures toward bipartisanship, including the unexpected shout-out to John McCain, who had campaigned in favor of mandatory catastrophic insurance--and I don't want to be cynical about those gestures, even though I think he's naive about the other party's intentions--but that's not where his stresses fell. He was reminding the majority who voted for him why they did that. He was reminding independents that the reason why no progress has been made toward universality, mandates, and affordabiity is Republicans--as with 1935's Social Security and 1965's Medicare laws. He was reminding them, as well as the few rational Republicans left, that the insurance companies are not the glories of American value.

He did not sound like a patsy. He offered specific programs but the peroration was clear: he stood for values and national character. If he went too easy on the insurance companies for my taste--his audience could have used the information that Americans pay insurance companies twice as much as they pay doctors--he took a proper jab at Republicans (they know who they are) who make up the party of fear. You can say that he's still not willing to talk to Americans straight about the need to limit high-tech medicine for the very old and very frail. Presidents won't do that.

But he bet on the strength of the American character. It was his finest public moment since the Inaugural. I'm betting national decency wins.

David Weigel writes in the Washington Independent that Republican Whip Eric Cantor is up in arms about the prospect of such radicals as Cass Sunstein joining what he calls Obama's "virtual army of 'czars'--each wholly unaccountable to Congress yet tasked with spearheading major policy efforts for the White House." Specifically, Obama has named his vastly learned former University of Chicago colleague to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and Glenn Beck and the rest of his tag-team of McCarthyites are collectively beside themselves about their fantasy of Operation Radical Trojan Horsemen, the most audacious Obama power grab since Death Panels.

Senators John Cornyn and Saxby Chambliss have placed holds on Sunstein's appointment because they find him insufficiently enthusiastic about hunting. Another, yet unnamed member of the World's Most Overrated Legislative Body has joined them.

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I went to MoveOn's candlelight vigil at the corner of Central Park across from Columbus Circle in New York City last evening. Possibly there were 400 people at the peak, some holding candles. Most, as you'd expect, were middle-aged or older, but there was a sprinkling of the younger, including a man who had open-heart surgery at 26. Citizens went to the microphone, told their horror stories,some quite gripping, of medical woe, of insurance refusal, and so on. Some read snippets from other people's horror stories.

A perfectly sweet day for a rally, personal, nothing strident or threatening. Personal stories. Americans love personal stories.

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1. Senator, The Messenger of Fort Dodge, IA reports that a World War II veteran named Tom Eisenhower said at your Monday town meeting in Pocahontas:

The president of the United States, that's who you should be concerned about. Because he's acting like a little Hitler, I'd take a gun to Washington if enough of you would go with me.

This Youtube shows that you did not say a word about your constitutent's threat.
What is your view of "taking a gun to Washington"? Why didn't you say so on Monday?

2. The Messenger goes on to quote you:

"I'm not going to vote for any bill I'm not going to read," said the senator, as the audience rang out with applause.

The Patriot Act of 2001 was 342 pages long. You voted for it. Did you read it? The 2007 omnibus spending bill was 613 pages long. You voted for it. Did you read it?

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So the good Senator Grassley, who was not so long ago recommending the moonbat Glenn Beck's book, is up in arms at the prospect of a public option:

"Government is not a competitor, it's a predator," he said of the public option that has been embraced by key congressional Democrats. "We'd have 120 million people opt out [of private insurance], then pretty soon everyone is in health care under the government and there's no competitor."

Let's see: And why might hordes of people opt out of private insurance if they had the choice? (Informed estimates are far lower than Grassley's 120 million, but that's not the point.) Could it be that they would rationally judge that a public option would do better for them than private insurance companies that rip people off, dump them when they can, sometimes impose lifetime ceilings (aka rationing), virtually monopolize many markets, charge a gross overhead, require a vast expenditure of bookkeeping hours filling out the many different forms that each company in its distinct wisdom requires, and above all seek to maximize profit?

My excellent general practitioner left his profession a few years ago because he was so sick of the paperwork (more than 90 different forms!) and overall hassle.

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